Children's classification and lexicalization of attractiveness, gender, and race: differential displays of these concepts and relatedness to bias and flexibility.

Minimal research has examined children's functional use of attractiveness to classify and label others, an important step in the development of children's biases. This study compared 3- to 11-year-olds' classification, sorting, and labeling of others and themselves based on attractiveness, gender, and race and also investigated whether these abilities and other characteristics predicted children's bias and flexibility. Relative to gender and race, children rarely used attractiveness to spontaneously classify people and were less accurate at sorting and labeling others and themselves by attractiveness, suggesting that they have a less explicit concept of attractiveness. Predictors of bias differed depending on domain and assessment method (forced choice or non-forced choice), showing that children's bias is affected by both individual differences and task characteristics. Predictors of flexibility differed based on whether children were assigning positive or negative traits to target children, demonstrating that the valence of attributes is an important consideration when conceptualizing children's flexibility.